Flixwagon, one of the top providers of live video broadcasting applications for consumers, has just announced the launch of a new telco-grade platform targeting both mobile carriers and media organizations. The platform is designed for integration with carriers’ handsets so that their users will be able to stream live video from their phones directly to their blogs, social networking sites, video sites, and more, simply by using the Flixwagon mobile application. With this platform, they are paving the way for news organizations to incorporate more citizen journalism and user-generated content into their online offerings and TV broadcasts.
The Platform For Mobile Carriers
Mobile carriers have invested heavily in building out their 3G infrastructures and they now are in need of recouping those costs. By offering compelling applications and services that take advantage of the increased bandwidth, they have the opportunity to generate additional data revenue. A livestreaming application such as Flixwagon certainly fills that need.
The new platform will allow mobile carriers the ability to create a customizable version of the Flixwagon mobile app where additional features unique to the carriers’ handsets and mobile software could be added.
The livestreams created by the Flixwagon users can then be streamed to the web, either on the Flixwagon site itself or onto a proprietary web site owned and operated by the mobile carriers themselves. Users can set privacy controls within the app, allowing their streams to either be public or private. They can create groups of friends and family for private streams, which they can configure in the app’s settings.
The Platform For Media Organizations
After a Flixwagon livestream ends, the video is made available for later viewing. This makes the offering ideal for news organizations who want to incorporate footage from citizen journalists into their web sites or feature older footage in their broadcasts.
MTV has worked with Flixwagon in the past on a number of endeavors, including three 30-minute livestreams from backstage at a Jonas Brothers concert. Those videos alone hit the Flixwagon site with a total of 6 million streams over the course of one weekend. They also worked with MTV to stream political coverage as a part of the “Choose or Lose” campaign. For this, Flixwagon helped in getting live footage from the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, as well as exclusive videos filmed back on Super Tuesday, 2008.
VP Candidate Sarah Palin in an MTV interview via Flixwagon, Super Tuesday
Although the company is not announcing partners at this time, VP and co-founder, Sarig Reichert, hinted that there is already interest from a couple of carriers both here in the U.S. and in Latin America.
At the moment, the Flixwagon service supports Nokia devices and the iPhone (via an app for jailbroken phones). However, they will be adding support for additional platforms such as Java-enabled phones in the near future.
